Children and young people’s participation: How do we know if it is making a difference?

21 March 2017, 9.30am to 4.30pm

Registration fee £75.00 – includes lunch and refreshments

This workshop will explore why it is important to measure children and young people’s participation and how to go about doing it. It will focus on two different but interlinked approaches to monitoring and evaluating progress in implementing Article 12 of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

First, it will introduce a toolkit for monitoring and evaluating children’s participation, developed and piloted across many countries through which to measure the scope, quality and outcomes of children’s participation. This is relevant for on-going or new initiatives, in all settings involving children – for example, child protection, schools, nurseries, children in local authority care, NGO projects and programmes, children’s homes or youth councils or parliaments.

Second, it will introduce a Child Participation Assessment Tool, developed by the Council of Europe, which provides 10 indicators against which to measure States’ compliance with their obligations under Article 12, together with a guidance manual on how to collect and assess the relevant data.

Course presenter

The workshop will be led by Gerison Lansdown, an international expert on children and young people’s participation. Gerison was the founder director, 1992-2000, of the Children’s Rights Alliance for England, and, over the past 16 years, has worked as an international children’s rights consultant and advocate, publishing and lecturing widely on the subject of children’s rights. She has produced a number of publications on children’s participation rights and evolving capacities, as well as working with the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on several general comments, including on Article 12, Article 31 and on the rights of children during adolescence. She is a senior associate of the International Institute for Child Rights and Development in Victoria, and has an Honorary Doctorate from The Open University. She was for nine years Vice Chair of UNICEF-UK, and is currently on the editorial advisory board of the Canadian Journal of Children’s Rights, a trustee for APPROACH, the Global Initiative to End All Corporal Punishment of Children, and Chair of Child to Child.

Who should attend

Anyone with an interest in, or working in the field of, children’s rights and participation.

Workshop organised by CRFR at the University of Edinburgh, as part of the partnership with the Stirling Centre for Child Wellbeing and Protection and Together (Scottish Alliance for Children’s Rights for the 2017 seminar series ‘The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) in Scotland’. The seminar series is funded by the Scottish Universities Insight Institute.